Crossword Stories:
Sixteen years ago or so I was a full-time undergrad student at Eastern Connecticut State University. One semester I took a Creative Writing course: Writing Fiction, taught by novelist Bruce Clements. I needed to write 40 pages of material by the end of the semester. After about 25 pages of material I started to run out of ideas. To avoid getting a low grade I came up with the idea to use the answers from completed Crossword Puzzles to write stories. For years I have been doing crossword puzzles. It was the same basic idea as Mad Libs . Anyway, using crossword puzzles usually didn't result in stories that would 'flow', but the professor liked the idea and I got a B as a final grade in his class.
A few years ago I came up with a more elaborate idea for writing Crossword Stories. I went to a print shop and purchased about 200 or so cards and on the cards I alternated between 1-Across, 1-Down, etc. until I ran out of cards. I would shuffle the cards, so what crossword answer(s) I would use would be as random as possible. I also bought a pair of dice which I would throw to determine how many sentences would be in any given paragraph. One Christmas Eve I tried it out and wrote a short story entitled "The Island, the Volcano and the Missionaries" in which a recent volcanic eruption and the presence of Christian missionaries both do damage to an indigenous island culture. It took me about three hours to write. The story is pretty good, but it doesn't exactly 'flow.' In the next week or so I plan to post it here.
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